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TheVoiceOfJoyce When Covid was declared over, in 2022, many benefits were cancelled by the GOP , including free school lunches to 50 million kids. Now that the middle classes are struggling, their kids need school lunches, too. Sometimes, these meals are the only meals provided to starving children. The State of Pennsylvania is cancelling school lunch debt, for kids in need of Lunches, who can’t afford payment. The federal government is bringing Legislation forward reinstating school lunches, debt free for everyone in need. It’s estimated 100 million may benefit.

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www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/oct/06/us-cancel-student-lunch-debt-legislation

There’s people who are very, very poor, and they are getting free or reduced [meals]. And those people who are very wealthy, that are unbothered” by the cost, said Summers, 18, who’s now part of the Pennsylvania Cancel Lunch Debt Coalition, an activist group associated with the local Democratic Socialists of America chapter, and the Debt Collective, a debtors’ union. “But then there’s that very forgotten large middle element, which is not receiving the help they need, but is still suffering from the debt.”

The coalition has since organized to have over $20,000 in school meal debt canceled in Bucks county, and seen state legislators introduce bills to provide universal school meals in the state, something that had been offered nationwide during the pandemic, but ended last year. Now, it seems, their national representatives are paying attention too.

Last week, Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman introduced a bill that would cancel all student meal debt. The bill, titled the School Lunch Debt Cancellation Act, would order the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) to pay off all of the debt that students accumulate when they cannot afford school lunches or breakfasts. Fetterman – who chairs the Senate Subcommittee on Food and Nutrition, Specialty Crops, Organics and Research – was joined by co-sponsors Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Peter Welch.

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